The bizarroverse of the black comedy Being John Malkovich does a better job of explaining the NHL’s recent gambit than I can. Note the receptionist speaking perfect Legalese in the second half of the ~two-minute clip.

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W-a-y back when I was in Grade Four, there was one afternoon a week where a few of my classmates would disappear to points unknown for a session our teacher (Mrs. Rees) referred to as Remedial Arithmetic. These were the kids who struggled with basic mathematical concepts and relationships to the point that simple numbers like “50%” were an ongoing challenge, especially come report card time. They needed all the help they could get, including these weekly group sessions with a special tutor.

Gary Bettman makes another point.

Not sure if the term “Remedial Arithmetic” is in vogue these days — several generations of political correctitude have come and gone since the ’60s! — but there are times that it occurs to me that the not-so-tall foreheads running the National Hockey League could use some of it. This is, after all, the league where 1 + 1 = 3, thanks to that wonderful Bettman Point that is created from the ether and awarded as a bonus to two teams that can’t resolve a game in regulation time. It’s the league where the statistics don’t add up nor even follow a consistent logic — for example, every game has a winning team and a winning goalie, but not necessarily a winning-goal scorer. It’s the league that has made a shambles of its own record books — did you know Hall of Fame coach Al Arbour won less than half of his games?

Not surprisingly, the mathematical challenges extend into the shadowy realm that is governed by the Collective Bargaining Agreement. You know, that document where they have to stop hockey for a year or so to figure it out, then spend the next decade before it expires figuring out what’s wrong with it. One mathematical uncertainty that we touched on earlier this week, is that the relationship between salary and cap hit is more than a little tenuous, and in certain circumstances — early retirement of a player with a low-dollar tail on the back end of his long-term contract — the numbers need not add up at all. Another has to do with the seeming fact that salaries are declared in Monopoly money, but paid in real dollars which are heavily discounted by escrow tax.

Sometimes, though, new problems stem from what comes across as poor comprehension of mathematical concepts. Case in point is the division between the salary cap ceiling and floor. Originally the latter was designed at 55% of the former, but along the way the two sides switched gears and made the difference between the two — the “payroll range” — a fixed dollar amount, namely $16 million.

Why was this a bad idea? Both the floor and ceiling have not-so-gradually risen in lockstep with each other, like so:

When expressed as a percentage, however (as budgets frequently are), every increase is much greater on the floor side of the equation than the ceiling. Those teams with the least financial resources are forced to increase their spending by a much greater percentage than the teams with the most dollars at their disposal are allowed to.

Add up those increases (or to be mathematically correct, multiply them), and the effective spread between top and bottom is much narrower in 2012 dollars than it was in 2005 dollars. Put another way, the ceiling has risen by exactly 80% from the 2005-06 season to the (mythical?) 2012-13 campaign. The floor, meanwhile, has buckled by 136%.

Expressed as a year-to-year percentage of floor to ceiling:

When parsed this way the ceiling holds firm, while the floor is pushed ever closer as the overall cap inexorably rises. What was once under 59% has made its way above 77%. Such is life on the 7½th floor.

One needn’t be fluent in the legalese — may the Schwartz be with you! — of the CBA to see the effects this has had on the league’s poorest franchises. In recent years especially, certain teams have struggled to get to the minimum payroll, embarking on forced spending sprees that commit tens of millions of dollars (each!) to mid-level players like Tomas Fleischmann, Scottie Upshall, Tomas Kopecky, Sean Bergenheim and the 35+ Ed Jovanovski, just to choose a single recent example, the Florida Panthers of one summer ago. Before that cash call the Panthers had no big stars and a budget payroll. Now they just have no big stars.

What is the NHL’s approach to this issue in the pending negotiations? Why, it’s to bring ceiling and floor closer together than ever, of course! Let’s cut that $16 MM gap between rich and poor back to $12 MM, that’ll solve everybody’s problems in Sunrise, Glendale and Long Island. Not to mention in Toronto, Philadelphia and Manhatten.

I have to admit I’m baffled by this ploy, unleashed yesterday in a battery of five negotiating planks with which the league conked the NHLPA in a ferocious opening salvo. Some of the others at least follow a logic that one would see as beneficial to the owners … lower percentage of hockey related-revenues? Sure, of course they all want that. Longer period of indentured service? Sounds good, even if they haven’t connected the dots to a possible talent drain, as the Cult’s Jonathan Willis did about fifteen minutes after yesterday’s news hit the wireless.

But this business of forcing floor towards ceiling — or is it vice versa? — doesn’t make a lick of sense. Teams with limited liquidity are obliged to spend-spend-spend, while those whose coffers are overflowing are curtailed more strictly than ever.

Do the owners have some sort of internal plan for much more generous revenue sharing to provide some balance to the income side of the annual statement? In the immortal words of Ball Four, “Yeah, sur-re!” Or is it a nefarious plot by the rich owners to drive the low-enders out of the business and ultimately contract the league, while they can in the meantime justify to their own fans not spending more of the profits on talent acquisition? Bringing the ceiling down would certainly benefit the bottom line of the richest teams, but would their owners stoop to such a thing? I admit I’m reaching (not easily done in such cramped quarters) but I just don’t see a scenario where this ceiling-to-floor squeeze makes sense across the ownership spectrum. Yet it was one of the planks wielded yesterday in what in theory should have been a united platform.

Oh well, maybe the best answer can be found in that bizarroworld of Being John Malkovich, where the crunch between floor and ceiling is explained in the training video scene. (Warning: extremely high laugh-per-minute quotient.) Maybe the owners simply believe in (bad) fairy tales with happy endings …

No Gary Bettman jokes were used or abused in the procurement of this video. Feel free to make your own, however.

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